Dirt moving, food growing

I can’t help it: baby vegetable plants make my heart sing and my hands reach for the camera to capture their juvenile beauty.

These beets and turnips will soon fill their planting bed with lovely foliage, shading the soil, conserving moisture, and providing my steamer pot with lots of fresh greens for dinner. As ordinary as it may be to some folks, growing my own food still delights me, excites me, motivates me.

And I need all the motivation I can get, to finish the next terrace above so I can build a second garden bed and grow even more food. Bushels of beans and tomatoes to can, onions and potatoes and carrots to store; our food supply for months to come is just a wish, a dream, until I finish excavating the dirt, build the back wall, dig out the bed area, and fill it with growing soil. Oh, and plant it all, too.

This weekend I nearly got the dirt moving all done, working an hour at a time and resting well in between. I wanted badly to finish the project completely, but my legs turned to concrete by mid-afternoon, and I was so drained I had to lie down on the living room floor and take a nap.

Thankfully, there are just a few more trugs of dirt to haul up to the gigantic pile above. Maybe 30 trips up those steps, which are just a working stairway I cut into the hill and reinforced with concrete block, giving me a shorter trip up to the top. It saved me many steps, and will be the last part of this second level to be cut away, leaving a clear run to lay the first course of what will be my third wall.

I’m planning to begin wall-building next weekend, and with three whole days off, my determined scottish workhorse self is already visualizing getting the wall completely built over the weekend. That’s a lofty goal and I may not achieve it, but that won’t keep me from trying.

Thanks Jo, I’m sooooo looking forward to my squash, it’s been so long since I’ve grown any! They are jumping up like beanstalks…

How I wish I could move that dirt downhill! I threw as much as I could to the bottom of the property, but I draw the line at dumping it out in the canyon, that’s illegal for one, and not environmentally responsible, on a steep hill it would just erode down into the drainage “creek.”

So, hauling it up is the only option. The pile is huge at this point and I’ll need to hire someone to come haul it away, my friends and neighbors have taken all they need already.